In this saga, where it's set in the 17th century in rural England where a nervous man goes along with three others during the chaos of a civil war to try and locate the man who vexed or did some wrong to his master and once he comes upon this sorcerer of sorts (O'Neil is his name, played by a great British character actor, Michael Smiley, you've seen him before somewhere) who makes this man and the others dig in the dirt to find treasure that may likely not be there, it's all about its unique sense of the world through visuals. This is black and white, grimy and gritty, where men have to squat and take s***ts and may end up being stung by nettles (or already have various ailments since it's g-ddamn 17th century backwoods England), and the director is one for bringing out the artifice in this stylized world, how it is all a moving painting after all.
For the first hour I was digging what is a fairly unique experience, with a filmmaker really in love with the kinds of films that Herzog and perhaps Tarkovsky too made in their prime (Aguirre and Andrei Rublev come to mind at first, especially Herzog with the moments where the characters pause to be frozen - but we know they're being frozen as they intentionally pose - for tableaux that are funny and disturbing, but paintings all the same). It's also wildly violent at times, and the shock of it is visceral but it's also done in such a way that we shouldn't be too repelled by it since it already goes hand in hand with everything else around these people.
There are hallucinatory touches here and there - a moment of intense screaming from Whitehead, as he follows O'Neil into a tent and proceeds to scream for a reason we can't see or know exactly why (call it the wiles of a sorcerer I guess) leads to Whitehead walking out of the tent being led by a rope tied around him, and it's done in the sort of intense slow-motion long take that might make von Trier sit up and take notice. It's a massive moment in a movie that is meant to wow us with visual splendor over plot, which is fine... until the last half hour when it becomes *only* that. Wheatley is working from a script (written by someone else) so there is the semblance of a story, and the small cast makes it that we know who everyone is despite some (though certainly not all) of the dialog being that British that needs subtitles.
But, know this before going in, this movie is weird. I mean like, weird-weird, the sort of weird that tests my thresh hold as someone who loves weird s***. I think the thing for me is the context: is it from the mushrooms that Whitehead scarfs down while squatting in the field more than halfway into this movie? What's with the, uh, fuzzy planet that he keeps seeing in the sky coming his way? And then Wheatley and his editors go completely daffy with cutting together and superimposing images like there's no tomorrow - there's actually a warning at the start of the film that there are intense strobe effects (guess Wheatley may not get too many epileptics coming up to him with Field in Englanfd posters) - and it all is impressive on the surface.... but at the end of it all, what's the point? I couldn't help but feel by the end of this that I wasted my time, even as I was impressed by the actors who really commit to this world, and it's a truly unique world that we feel immersed in, because there wasn't a good emotional through-line.
That may sound like I'm not opening myself up to the experimentation or poetry but, believe me, I was. I left this somewhat cold, admiring it being a vision from someone really going for something daring, but not giving a squib for the people on screen - and by the last ten minutes especially it's squarely an exercise in style and ultra-violence (how a couple of characters die is especially graphic, I mean gratuitously so). A Field in England is like when your much hipper friend on facebook posts some obscure underground rock album that is supposedly one of the coolest/most hardcore things you've never heard before. And there may be a reason it's obscure.
For the first hour I was digging what is a fairly unique experience, with a filmmaker really in love with the kinds of films that Herzog and perhaps Tarkovsky too made in their prime (Aguirre and Andrei Rublev come to mind at first, especially Herzog with the moments where the characters pause to be frozen - but we know they're being frozen as they intentionally pose - for tableaux that are funny and disturbing, but paintings all the same). It's also wildly violent at times, and the shock of it is visceral but it's also done in such a way that we shouldn't be too repelled by it since it already goes hand in hand with everything else around these people.
There are hallucinatory touches here and there - a moment of intense screaming from Whitehead, as he follows O'Neil into a tent and proceeds to scream for a reason we can't see or know exactly why (call it the wiles of a sorcerer I guess) leads to Whitehead walking out of the tent being led by a rope tied around him, and it's done in the sort of intense slow-motion long take that might make von Trier sit up and take notice. It's a massive moment in a movie that is meant to wow us with visual splendor over plot, which is fine... until the last half hour when it becomes *only* that. Wheatley is working from a script (written by someone else) so there is the semblance of a story, and the small cast makes it that we know who everyone is despite some (though certainly not all) of the dialog being that British that needs subtitles.
But, know this before going in, this movie is weird. I mean like, weird-weird, the sort of weird that tests my thresh hold as someone who loves weird s***. I think the thing for me is the context: is it from the mushrooms that Whitehead scarfs down while squatting in the field more than halfway into this movie? What's with the, uh, fuzzy planet that he keeps seeing in the sky coming his way? And then Wheatley and his editors go completely daffy with cutting together and superimposing images like there's no tomorrow - there's actually a warning at the start of the film that there are intense strobe effects (guess Wheatley may not get too many epileptics coming up to him with Field in Englanfd posters) - and it all is impressive on the surface.... but at the end of it all, what's the point? I couldn't help but feel by the end of this that I wasted my time, even as I was impressed by the actors who really commit to this world, and it's a truly unique world that we feel immersed in, because there wasn't a good emotional through-line.
That may sound like I'm not opening myself up to the experimentation or poetry but, believe me, I was. I left this somewhat cold, admiring it being a vision from someone really going for something daring, but not giving a squib for the people on screen - and by the last ten minutes especially it's squarely an exercise in style and ultra-violence (how a couple of characters die is especially graphic, I mean gratuitously so). A Field in England is like when your much hipper friend on facebook posts some obscure underground rock album that is supposedly one of the coolest/most hardcore things you've never heard before. And there may be a reason it's obscure.